If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Welcome to Mac-Forums! Join us to comment and to customize your site experience! Members have access to different forum appearance options, and many more functions.

Hey guys. I've been lurking around the forums here for a bit and have been doing a ton of research on Macs for the past couple of weeks, completely soaking up the Mac 101 and Switch 101 pages at the Apple site.

I've always wanted to get one but could never go for one for a variety of reasons. However, now that Macs are Intel based and can run Windows both natively and via emulation, I became more earnest in my desire to get one.

I drove down to the local Apple Store and after playing around a bit with the model I wanted, I whipped out my credit card for a Black Macbook. Cost me a pretty penny, but just a couple of hours later, I knew it was a worthwhile investment.

I've had the notebook for about 24 hours now and my PC has been feeling rather lonely I've already installed a bunch of software that I learned about from this forum and things have been going smoothly.

I tested out Boot Camp the first night but haven't gotten around to messing around with Parallels yet. I'm running the trials for both iWork and Office 2004 to figure out which one I want to purchase. So far I'm leaning toward iWork simply because it's faster (I know, Office isn't running on a Universal binary, but I can't wait for Office 2007 as I need a word processor before Late 2007).

Overall, I just wanted to thank you guys here at Mac Forums for providing a ton of information that allowed my transition to go smoothly. It's only been a day, but I feel as though I've been using this thing my entire life. Oh yea, I love Desktop Manager :cool: I might give Smackbook a try once I do all the research.

Thanks. I've been doing some more playing around. I have gotten rid of the Boot Camp partition as I have managed to get Parallels working. Combined with Virtue Desktops (I like this one better than Desktop Manager) having Windows running at the same time as Mac OS X is AMAZING. Now I don't have to worry about not having Microsoft Office available after the 30-day trial was over.

Oh, and the cool thing about Virtue is that it has the "smackbook" built right in. It was cool for about a minute, but not very useful as it isn't good when you have more than one virtual desktop. Ah well, still much better than a Windows box :yinyang:

I tested out Boot Camp the first night but haven't gotten around to messing around with Parallels yet. I'm running the trials for both iWork and Office 2004 to figure out which one I want to purchase. So far I'm leaning toward iWork simply because it's faster (I know, Office isn't running on a Universal binary, but I can't wait for Office 2007 as I need a word processor before Late 2007).

One of the reasons I've got Mac is that it runs windows, but to be honest I rarely run it. Mac is more than enough for me. The most amazing thing is that I'm using two monitors, sometimes I run Mac on one and windows on the other and just switch between the two, it's fun.
However, I found a problem on running games with 3d graphics on the virtual windows platform.

When I had Boot Camp installed, I was using Mac OS for about 99% of the time. I never really needed to boot into Windows for anything, but then again, I've only had the thing for about 2 days now, so that doesn't mean I wouldn't have needed it later.

However, now that I have Windows installed via Parallels, I can just use my copy of Office for Windows, which I find runs faster than Office 2004 for Mac. I think my use of Mac OS may have dropped to about 98% now :black: